Beware the thought police, punishing words not deeds

Times of London
November 08, 2003

Beware the thought police, punishing words not deeds
by Matthew Parris

Like a splinter, a small injustice can enter the body politic almost unnoticed. Only with time does the invasion begin to inflame. It can happen that only after a story has left the news does a sense of its injustice steal upon us.

Five years ago I thought little about the sacking of the England football coach, Glenn Hoddle, after he had expressed the familiar, standard and ancient reincarnationist view that those born disabled may be being punished for a former life.

This newspaper’s strongest ground for leading the criticism (which Tony Blair joined on Richard & Judy) was that Mr Hoddle had volunteered the opinion in an interview. But I remember wondering whether, if these beliefs had surfaced not in an interview but in a private conversation reported to journalists by a spy among his friends, that would have made the critical difference and he would have survived.

Public opinion was in some confusion as to what was unacceptable. Was it that Mr Hoddle should believe what he believed, or that he should say what he believed, and there was more than a whiff of a mob instinct to punish him for the belief itself. Perhaps we have not travelled so far from the mentality of the Inquisition as we like to suppose, but instead have nominated new heresies.

As chance would have it, my hypothetical spy, willing to make a public report of another’s private opinion, moved from hypothesis to reality with the screening by the BBC a couple of weeks ago of a documentary, The Secret Policemen. An undercover reporter joined a police training school as a pretended recruit, insinuated himself into the friendship and confidence of his fellows, and, through the use of clandestine recording equipment over four months, proved that several of the trainees held racist opinions.

The documentary caused a sensation. Most of the offenders (for whom is it not easy to feel sympathy) have resigned or been sacked; up to eight careers have been wrecked, strenuous police attempts to combat racism in the force have been set back, and one capable young television journalist has earned his spurs.

It started a discussion which has reverberated all this week: should serving police officers be permitted to belong to the British National Party, as one of the recruits did? The Home Secretary has just said he will ban this.

Secret Policemen won huge acclaim and has attracted little criticism. But I thought it a sneaky and tendentious programme, rather disgraceful in its way, which might better have been dubbed Thought Police, for that was the role played by the BBC. In particular it raised questions about standards in documentary journalism. Slow-motion walking shots and the use of creepy music to set a sinister scene should always set alarm bells ringing; while heavy reliance on pixelation to blur faces is a telltale, suggesting that a documentary maker is unwilling to defend the impression of character which a viewer might gain from what he has seen.

After promising to demonstrate that his colleagues would "go further than racist language and take their attitudes on to the streets", all our reporter could show us was a mate repeating in a Manchester club what he had said in the canteen. Though he kept claiming he was about to show how an officer’s private opinions translated into unprofessional behaviour, he illustrated this only once.

He led his victims on. Discussing racism sympathetically, he suggested to a friend: "I bet it’s second nature to you?" A fellow trainee who knew Hackney said: "The majority of street robbers are black. In Hackney they run riot. Black community leaders blame everything on the police." The documentary offered us this remark as proof of the officer’s racism.

Critical to the documentary’s thrust was the story of an unnamed (and unshown) Asian recruit who appeared to be deeply unpopular with his comrades, and was being fast-tracked into the force (it was suggested) on account of being non-white. Viewers were invited to believe that that this person was shunned and disliked because he was Asian. The possibility that he was unpopular for other reasons was never explored, though viewers will have picked up powerful hints that such was the case.

ONE TV programme can prove more powerful than a dozen scrupulously researched Commons select committee reports. Secret Policemen and its aftermath raises in my mind a doubt that individuals can ever find proper redress once their reputation has been thoroughly blackened in the media; and reminds us how afraid politicians, employers and commentators can be to shield the unpopular or the unlikable, once the gale of public hatred is up.

Yet how difficult would it be to do a similar hatchet job in any newspaper office, or, indeed, in the BBC itself? Armed with a secret camera, I expect I too could stitch together 50 minutes of embarrassing footage, suggesting private attitudes which were at odds with a journalist’s duty to be fair. What if there were in existence a secret film of a dinner party in the past where Greg Dyke, the BBC’s Director-General, revealed a strong dislike of the Tory party? I have watched this documentary twice now, and carefully.

Somebody in the BBC too should take a hard second look at it.

Yet the damage is done. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, lurched from an outright condemnation of the documentary to praising it and echoing its conclusions once he saw which way the media wind was blowing. Sir John Stevens, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, joined him, declaring he would like "to personally arrest" all eight trainees — a perplexing statement as I cannot find even prima-facie evidence that most of them committed any crime. Sir John has gone on to declare his support for Mr Blunkett’s plan to outlaw membership by police officers of the BNP.

People are treating that question as though its answer was obvious, but I find it difficult. The BNP is a lawful party in our parliamentary democracy. Being a BNP member might seem unacceptable in a police officer, but how about being a BNP voter? Should police officers who were members of their local Tory associations have policed picket lines in the last miners’ strike? This raises — as did Secret Policemen — tricky questions about respect for the boundary between private thought and public behaviour.

The first thing we should acknowledge is that there are no arguments applicable to membership of the police which cannot be extended to other forms of public service. In the execution of his duty it is important that a police officer does not discriminate on grounds of race, but this must also be true of a housing officer, a social worker, a doctor, schoolteacher or nurse. Nobody employed by the State should behave in a racist manner in the workplace, but if racist opinions are assumed to lead to racist behaviour, where will the investigations end? "Ah," you may say, "but there are special sensitivities where the police are concerned." True, but partly because their work has (rightly) become the focus of huge public controversy. Focuses move. Remember, it is not many years since this newspaper and the Prime Minister felt an urgent need to see a football coach sacked because of the "sensitivities" of his implied approach to the disabled. A prominently reported case of racism in a school or jobcentre could provoke a secret TV documentary about private attitudes in school staffrooms or jobcentre staff canteens.

Secondly, we should acknowledge that there are no arguments applicable to racism which cannot be extended to other private beliefs which may affect public servants’ approach to their customers. Should practising Muslims be allowed to be police officers, for instance, given the attitude of Islam to homosexuality or women’s rights? Should devout Roman Catholic doctors be allowed to advise women patients on issues of family planning or abortion? What might be a Hindu policeman’ s approach to an Untouchable suspect? Should atheists be allowed to teach in faith schools? Should a reincarnationist work among the congenitally disabled? Should a police officer who abhors hunting hold the ring between the hunt and its saboteurs? Should a prominent supporter of the Labour Party be Director-General of the BBC?

Racism is distinguished from Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Judaism or Islam by being unable to claim any respectable followers, but in its potential to harden the hearts of its believers towards other human groups it is not alone among belief systems.

In deciding how we should approach these believers, can you not see the irony? It is that we should turn racists into a sort of race, and behave like racists towards them. It is that should fall into the very error of which we accuse them: judging people by category, rather than on their actions.

PERSONAL BELIEF and its private expression are a human right. The point at which an individual loses his claim on our tolerance is when personal belief crosses over into public behaviour. In this debate, no other anchor will hold. We have to believe a person is able — I do not say certain, or even always likely — to mark a boundary in his own life between his inward prejudices and his outward behaviour. We have to accept that unless or until he fails — unless or until an officer whose views are racist, or sexist, or homophobic behaves improperly towards a black or gay or female person — then his beliefs should be no ground for dismissal.

By all means ban a police officer from membership of any political party, not just the BNP, but do so because joining a party is a sort of public statement, not because his opinions — while they remain opinions — are any business of ours. Despicable as a young police recruit’s private thoughts may be, and worthy as a television director may consider the aims of his art, the latter has no window into the former’s soul.